Satirical Poetry: More Please!

Satirical poetry is relatively thin on the ground just now – it can hardly be for lack of provocation – but I have found that my own attempts have been sufficiently well received to make me think that it is worth more writers having a go.  I have tended to think that it works best when using relatively formal metres but of course that isn't a hard and fast rule.  My satire (or do I mean diatribe?) against the Coalition Government, Get Real!, published by Rack Press in 2011 used the very satisfying form perfected by Burns and my most recent one, Trench Feet, also from Rack Press earlier this year, has just earned some kind words from the Poetry Book Society selectors.

The PBS pamphlet choice for this quarter is Holly Hopkins' Soon Every House Will Have One (Smith/Doorstop) but they singled out several runners-up, including Trench Feet about which they wrote in the new PBS Bulletin: "After Get Real!, Murray's 2011 pamphlet satirising the Coalition Government, he now turns his attention to the celebrations of the centenary of the First World War.  Here bright, ambitious academic Jeremy Button, is commissioned to make a TV series focusing on the War Poets, but things do not go according to plan in this witty and erudite lampoon."  I should say that the wildly exaggerated scenes satirising a London literary prize-giving party are drawn from life but, no, I am not going to tell you where and when!

Get Real! is out of print as a pamphlet but the full text is in my Acapulco: New and Selected Poems (Melos Press) and it can be ordered online from Melos.  Trench Feet is still in print and can be ordered online from Rack Press or from poetry-loving bookshops like the London Review Bookshop in London or Foyle's.